Secord Tells of Iranian Offer to Aid Rescue of Hostages

During Lt. Col. Oliver L. North’s secret efforts to get Iranian help to free U.S. hostages in Lebanon, an Iranian negotiator offered to steer an armed rescue attempt to the place where they were hidden, but the idea was rejected, according to a published interview with retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Richard V. Secord.

Secord said the matter came up when he and North attended a meeting in August, 1986, in Brussels, Belgium, with representatives of Hashemi Rafsanjani, the Speaker of the Iran Parliament. He quoted one of the Iranian representatives, who were known as the “second channel,” as saying that “the best way to clear up the problem . . . was to give us the location of the hostages and let us deal with it.”

After the proposal had been discussed “several times,” Secord said he put the offer before “Ollie’s chain of command,” as “possibly the best present we will ever get.” But Secord said in the interview, which appears in the October issue of Playboy magazine, that neither North nor his superiors wanted to use armed force because “they thought they could get immediate results by negotiation.”

Wanted to Try Rescue

Secord said he wanted to try such a rescue, arguing that “if we could get these guys to give us their intelligence and we could get some supporting collateral intelligence, there would be no better place to run a hostage raid than Beirut,” the Lebanese capital where the hostages were believed to be the captives of Muslim extremists.

North, a National Security Council aide at the time of the talks, was fired by President Reagan last November.

During the “second channel” talks, Secord said, North “used a little poetic license” to persuade the Iranians that President Reagan was “a man of God,” even portraying him as “a direct descendant of the God of Abraham.”

He also noted that later, when the Iranians made a secret trip to Washington last October, CIA wiretaps showed that “their handler made 44 calls to escort services until they got some girls to go to the Virginia hotel where they were staying.”

Denies Exorbitant Profits

Secord denied, as he did in his appearances before the congressional Iran- contra hearings, that he had made exorbitant profits from sales of U.S. arms to Iran, which were supposed to finance war materiel for anti-Communist Nicaraguan rebels .

After Secord described the contra leaders as disorganized and corrupt, he was asked why--if that was so and there had been no success for efforts to use the Iranians to win freedom for the hostages--didn’t North shut down both operations.

“North was under great pressure from the President to get the . . . hostages out of there,” Secord replied. “Reagan mentioned them every day. And I think North always saw the contras as better than I thought they were.”

While North felt that “the real game” in the negotiations with Iran “was a strategic one--opening up Iran,” Secord said he believed Reagan “just wanted the hostages out.” The geopolitical aspects of the negotiations, he said, were “too complex for the Reagan mentality.”

Secord, whose activities are known to be under investigation by Lawrence E. Walsh, the independent counsel looking into the affair, said he became involved with the contra cause as an arms dealer, even though he felt their operation was “screwed up like Hogan’s goat.” He said he became committed to developing air drops to arm the contras after North promised to “find funds for the operation” from “private donations.”